Wednesday, January 11, 2012

First story: Randy Johnson of Marion, Indiana was laid off from his job at a paper-products company in 1995 along with 200 other employees. The company had been purchased by Bain Capital six months previously. Mitt Romney was a principal of Bain Capital at the time. Mr. Johnson was laid off: That’s the hard-luck story, the whole thing. The guy was laid off. In 1995. He’s still whining. In fact he’s going professional with the whine: Obama’s people are trundling him around the country to tell his story in halls full of empathetically weeping citizens.

Second story (scroll down a bit on that link): Mr. and Mrs. Smith of Bristol, England have ten kids but only a four-bedroom house. Things are cramped. They are also hard-up: Mrs. Smith tells us that the children have only one Nintendo Wii console between them. If that’s got you reaching for your hanky, please note that neither of the Smiths has held a job since 2001, when the child count was three. They live entirely on government benefits, north of $150,000 worth per annum. The town gave them the house and also delivers breakfast to them.

“The welfare state seemed like a good idea when it first came up a hundred or so years ago.”

The first story there is a story about capitalism, one feature of which is that employees get fired, sometimes through no fault of their own. It happens to the nicest people. It’s happened to me. I was once fired from a job as a dishwasher (for taking a day off without telling the boss). As well as being a firee, I’ve also been a firer. In charge of small programming teams, a couple of times I had to fire people. (There is quite a high level of incompetence among computer programmers.) Swings and roundabouts.

The second story is about the welfare state. The welfare state seemed like a good idea when it first came up a hundred or so years ago. There was a lot of real distress beyond private charity’s reach: the chronic sick or disabled, the unemployed, the old. Diverting some portion of state revenues for relief of that distress seemed like a good idea—like a civilizational advance, in fact. Now it’s a gravy train for the workshy, especially for those willing to put a wall of kids between themselves and responsibility.

The two stories’ common denominator is kindness. Randy Johnson’s beef with capitalism is that it’s unkind. The Smiths’ beef with the welfare state is that it’s not being kind enough to them.

Here’s a different story, one that should be an illustration of kindness in action: the story of refugee resettlement in the USA. I just got back from a lecture by Don Barnett, an expert on the topic. Don ran through points he’s made in his Center for Immigration Studies research papers.

Bottom line: Refugee resettlement is a huge money racket, with executives of the VOLAGs (Voluntary Agencies) drawing extravagant salaries that are mostly paid by the US taxpayer. Government money has well-nigh chased out private charity. The United Nations drives the process, the State Department waving refugees through to the VOLAGS, who after a few weeks dump them on the welfare systems. (Refugees are immediately eligible for all welfare benefits.) Claims of refugee status are checked perfunctorily or not at all, so that a high proportion—Barnett thinks 90 percent—are bogus.

(There was a nice illustration of that bogosity in Portland, Maine recently. City officials wanted taxi drivers with airport-access permits to show up in person when renewing permits. Portland’s large contingent of Somali cabbies protested. “The Somalis have argued that they sometimes have to go to their homeland to attend to family matters, and that those trips can be lengthy. They might not be in the country when their permit is up for renewal.” For people admitted on refugee visas because of a “well-founded fear of persecution,” it seems a bit odd to be shuttling back and forth to the persecuting country. Hat tip here to the invaluable Refugee Resettlement Watch website.)

US refugee policy has always been borderline insane. Living in Hong Kong forty years ago I met several smart, well-educated young people with decent apartments and good jobs who told me they were waiting for their US refugee visas. Their families had fled to the colony from mainland China during the great famines of 1958-62. When I met them they were well-settled and prosperous, but the US government still considered them refugees. When I mentioned this to Don, he agreed but added that things have gotten way worse since 1980.

Again, it’s a matter of kindness. That at least is how uninformed people—say, 99 percent of the population—think of refugee resettlement. It’s a money racket, a scam on the taxpaying public—Don Barnett calls it “ACORN Without Borders.”

That illusion of kindness is bolstered by the churchly names that many of the refugee VOLAGS have. Catholic Charities (the biggest one); Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service; Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; Episcopal Migration Ministries…to object to these godly outfits would surely be blasphemy. Meanwhile, I’ll leave it to the ACLU to figure out how the boxcar-loads of money the government throws at the VOLAGs squares with church-state separation. Hello, ACLU? Hello? Hello?…

In his recent book, Steven Pinker tells us how violence, cruelty, and hardship have declined across the modern period, with the decline accelerating in recent decades. Pinker refrains from following the trend line into the future. But you can’t help thinking, and thinking that Pinker thinks, that the world—at least the Western world—will go on getting kinder and kinder until all occasions for distress or discomfort have been vanquished from human life.

Perhaps so; but my three stories illustrate that there may be an undertow working in the opposite direction.

If revulsion at capitalism’s unkindness brings us down to state socialism, and welfare-state kindness encourages parasites such as the Smiths to breed incontinently, and the bogus kindness of the refugee-resettlement scams fills up our towns with high-fertility people utterly alien to us in religion and culture, then Western civilization is killing itself with kindness.

Editor’s note: This post was written by Bryan Black and originally ran on ITS Tactical.

So why should you climb rope? First of all, if you’re not including rope climbing in your workout routines, you’re missing out on one of the best forearm and grip workouts around.

Climbing rope is also a core component of building functional strength. Every man should be able to physically save himself, and rope climbing trains many of the same muscles you’d need to pull or lift yourself to safety.

Sourcing a Rope to Climb

If you’ve never attempted to climb a rope before, don’t worry; I’ll address that below. The first step in progressing into rope climbing is an obvious one. Get yourself a rope! There are a couple of options I’ll recommend here.

In 1975 the Republican Party and the conservative movement in general in the U.S. were still close enough to the original principles of the American conservatism and the ideology of the Founding Fathers for Ronald Reagan to be able to write the following words:

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

There was no reaction against these words of Reagan at the time. All Republicans understood that Reagan was right, and that he wasn’t inventing a new Republicanism but only following in the steps of the previous generations of true conservatives. While libertarianism has different shades and different views about specific points of policy, conservatives at the time knew that conservatism and libertarianism are the same. Five years later, Reagan won the elections and change the course of America. It is debatable whether his policies really followed his rhetoric. But still, the libertarian ideas were conservative ideas, period, and no Republican at the time could get in trouble or be spoken of negatively is they professed libertarian ideas.

It is the tradition of Ronald Reagan that Senator Jim DeMint, the man in Washington DC with the greatest political contribution to the Tea Party movement in the last elections, the most conservative member of the Senate, warned the Republican Party that saying negative things about Ron Paul hurts the Republican Party. While the Republican establishment has been eager to point to Ron Paul’s libertarianism as a “proof” that he is not a true conservative (what would they say to Reagan then?), Jim DeMint called the party back to its true ideological roots. He said that the refusal of the other candidates to listen to Ron Paul is to “our detriment.” Jim DeMint added the most interesting comment one can find these days within the Republican field, that the debate within the Republican Party he is most comfortable with is between conservatives and libertarians.

This must give food for thought to the more conservative voters in the Republican Party. So far the establishment has been dismissing Ron Paul, but every alternative candidate has a record of big-government statism and business as usual. Some like Santorum have even openly declared that one of the foundational rights given by our Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence – the Pursuit of Happiness – is what is destroying America. Others, like Gingrich, have worked to introduce legislation to make internal passports compulsory for all Americans withing the United States. Of course, at the end, the call for more government intervention in the society is not different from the liberals’ own version of statism – or the differences are only in the details but not in principle.

DeMint may have another point too: The astounding difference in the average age of the voters for Ron Paul and the voters for the establishment candidates. The establishment likes to dismiss this with the words, “Ah, young people just want legal weed.” But such demeaning attitude won’t help the GOP. In a few years, the party’s main adversary will be the average life-span in the US, not any political opponent; the only mass influx of fresh blood is through the Ron Paul rallies. Alienating these crowds of enthusiastic young people may prove to sign the death certificate for the GOP in the next few years. And contrary to the establishment propaganda, these young people don’t “just want legal weed.” They want much more: liberty. And they see that liberty in the old conservative principles that Reagan wrote about, and Ron Paul is preaching and defending.

Jim DeMint, after all these years in the Senate, has proven to be a wise man of strong convictions. When the Republican field was still uncertain as to what they should do about the Tea Party, and even Michelle Bachmann was debating whether she should speak to the Tea Party rallies, DeMint threw his full weight of a conservative politician behind, calling the Tea Party a “spiritual revival,” and that “people are awaking to the fact that government is not and can not be god.” And now, while disagreeing with Ron Paul on specific points, DeMint is able to see that only the message of liberty can save the Republican Party from its current state of a country club gerontocracy. The Republican establishment – and the Republican voters too – better take his advice.

James O'Keefe, the intrepid young journalist who exposed ACORN, NPR and others, is at it again. This time, he went up to election workers in the New Hampshire polls and asked for Democratic primary ballots. Each time he did, he gave the name of a deceased former registered Democrat. New Hampshire passed a law not too long ago that forbade the poll workers from asking for IDs in order to vote. Guess what, the only time he wasn't given a ballot was when the poll worker was a friend of the recently deceased.

Welcome

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WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release. See the download page.

Rest easy, Twinkie lovers: Hostess Brands, the storied American manufacturer of snack cakes, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday, but said it will continue to churn out Ho Hos, Ding Dongs and other iconic products.

"Throughout the proceeding, we're going to operate business as normal," said Hostess spokesman Erik Halvorson. "They'll keep making Twinkies."

The company, based in Irving, Texas, filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. But Halvorson said the company does not plan to lay off any of its employees or close any plants. So the CupCakes and Sno Balls will keep on coming.

The company has about 19,000 full-time and part-time employees, including 10,413 hourly workers and 8,436 salaried workers, according to a court filing. About 83% of the employees are union members.

The company said that it pays about $63.2 million to its employees per pay period, and that it currently owes them $21 million for services rendered.

In its bankruptcy filing, the privately held company said that it owes more than $1 billion to creditors. The debt is spread out among a vast number of creditors -- between 50,000 and 100,000, the company said.

What people really DON'T like is the idea of a squad of grunts patrolling their neighborhood, confiscating private property, and "detaining" those suspected of terrorism. If that happens we are so far lost that there is no recourse to honest citizens but to oppose tyranny or roll over on their backs and wet themselves for their new totalitarian dictator. Because it is a very real option to have a well equipped Army and Police Force, and a population that views them as hostile to their way of life, kinda like that dusty old place I just left.

But I ain't going back to Afghanistan anytime soon.

I landed in Manas Air Base 9 June 2011, and flew out of Bagram to an undisclosed location in Europe on 11 January 2012. This was a "short" deployment, but by this time tomorrow I should be well on my way to an undisclosed location in the continental US.

I can't say exactly how the mood is in the Army as a whole, but in my little microcosm of experience the feeling of wasted time marks this deployment.

Your four man sniper unit is watching a platoon of infantry advance. The infantry is checking house after house in a housing community.You split into your two man teams. Your job is to fire and scoot, in relays. Never letting the platoon organize, or extract it's wounded.

The first one is in the upper leg of the leader. The shot hits him in the hip, where he has no body armor. He goes down hard and starts to scream in pain. As he lays there screaming, you get the medic who comes to his aid, again it is not a lethal shot. It is a gut shot that leaves both men down on the ground in pain, screaming for their lives.

Your team leaves it's first hide and moves, as the other team takes the platoon under fire.

They get each person who comes to the wounded comrades aid.

After the second, or third one your team is in position to take on the platoon, and keep them pinned down.

Every time someone tries to help their wounded friends they are shot. It doesn't take long for the members of the platoon to decide it is not safe to help the wounded, screaming, leader they were so quick to follow before, or their friends who are slowly dieing in front of them.

You put a second shot into the leader and he screams even more. The unit has to set there listening to him scream, as he bleeds out. It is 20 minutes of torture for the entire unit as their friends slowly dies. Finally the convulsions hit as the wounded commander dies.

You move to your over watch position to protect the other sniper team as they pull out.

That night as you eat a can of corned beef you think what will become of that unit you face today. The unit will react in one of two ways, it will become vicious and create more freedom fighters, or it will collapse and become useless as a combat unit.

As you lay there waiting for exhaustion to take over and allow a few hours of sleep, you know it was a good day, because you are alive, none of the men in your sniper teams has been hurt, and you have done your duty. Still it takes a long time of lying in the dark before your get the screams out of your head, and fall asleep.

The North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) portrays itself as concerned with the interests of students and public education. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric. NCAE represents the interests of approximately 50,000 teachers and public school employees who pay them. NCAE tax documents state the real purpose of its mission:

“[Tax] Exempt purpose is to advance the interests of educators and the promotion and protection of welfare of the association’s members”1

Remembrance

To die for one’s country is not only an act of bravery, it is THE act of bravery. For soldiers, it is just an extension of their military career, a part of their duty. As leaders have asked their soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the good of the society, it is only right for leaders to go through the same motion. They should practice what they have preached.

As war is seen as a noble act, tu sat serves as redemption in case of defeat. It is also a way to tell the enemy: “You might have won the battle/war but you don’t deserve to win because you don’t have the chinh nghia (just cause).” And it is not only just cause: it is the moral belief that the cause they are fighting for deserves their total sacrifice. Continues below

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Core Creek Militia

==============================My sixth great grandfather, his wife, and five of his six children were killed in battle with the Tuscarora Indians at Core Creek, NC.

The Seven Blackbirds

==============================My third great grandfather was an Ensign in the Revolutionary War, and saved his unit's flag after being wounded at the Battle of Brandywine. He was also at Kingston (Kinston), Wilmington, Charleston, Two Sisters and Augusta. He was at the defeat at Brier Creek and also Bee Creek.

Requiem Aeternam -
Eternal Rest Grant unto Them
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My second great grandfather was killed in action on May 3, 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
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My great grandfather and great uncle knew all the men in the "Civil War Requiem" video as they were part of the 53rd NC which was the sole unit defending Fort Mahone. (Fort Mahone was named "Fort Damnation" by the Yankees) *Handpicked men of the 53rd (My great grandfather was one of these) made the final, night assault at Petersburg in an attempt to break Grant's line. This was against Fort Stedman which was a few miles to the slight northeast. They initially succeeded, but reinforcements drove them back. This video is made from photographs which were taken the day after the 53rd evacuated the lines the night before to begin the retreat to Appomattox. I have many more pictures taken by the same photographer, one of these shows a 14 year old boy and the other is the famous picture of the blond, handsome soldier with his musket.
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*General Gordon promised the men a gold medal and 30 days leave if they accomplished their task and many years after the War my great grandfather wrote General Gordon, who was then governor of Georgia about this incident. They exchanged several letters which I have framed. See first link below.
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*The Attack On Fort Stedman
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"His Colored Friends"
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Lee's Surrender
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My Black NC Kinfolks
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Punished For Being Caught!

Great Grandfather Koonce

He was a drummer boy in the WBTS, survived the War only to die a few years later. He was caught in an ice storm on his way home, but instead of seeking shelter, continued on his horse until the end. His clothes had to be cut off and he died a few days later.